Romanticism

A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that turned toward nature and the interior world of feeling, in opposition to the mannered formalism and disciplined scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment era that preceded it. English poets such as William Wordsworth,Samuel Taylor Coleridge,John Keats,Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron produced work that expressed spontaneous feelings, found parallels to their own emotional lives in the natural world, and celebrated creativity rather than logic. Browse more Romantic poets. Romantic poems are generally Lyric poems. Much of Modernism is a reaction and rejection of conventions of Romanticism.

Modernism

A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century and reached its most radical peak on the eve of World War I. It grew out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath. For artists and writers, the Modernist project was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors. It evolved from the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason. Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence. In the early 20th century, novelists such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf (and, later, Joseph Conrad) experimented with shifts in time and narrative points of view. While living in Paris before the war, Gertrude Stein explored the possibilities of creating literary works that broke with conventional syntactical and referential practices. Ezra Pound vowed to “make it new” and “break the pentameter,” while T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in the shadow of World War I. Shortly after The Waste Land was published in 1922, it became the archetypical Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed registers and languages. Other poets most often associated with Modernism include H.D.,W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Modernism also generated many smaller movements; see also Acmeism, Dada, Free verse, Futurism, Imagism, Objectivism, Postmodernism, and Surrealism. Browse more Modern poets.

Note that Imagism doesn’t simply mean a poem that uses a lot of imagery — it’s a specific term related to a brief movement in the early part of the 20th century in which the poet tried to ONLY use imagery in a poem to create a kind of poem-photograph without any emotional language or abstract language.

Dada

A movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. The founders of this movement struck upon this essentially nonsense word to embody a simultaneously playful and nihilistic spirit alive among European visual artists and writers during and immediately after World War I. They salvaged a sense of freedom from the cultural and moral instability that followed the war, and embraced both “everything and nothing” in their desire to “sweep, sweep clean,” as Tristan Tzara wrote in his Dadaist Manifesto in 1920. In visual arts, this enterprise took the form of collage and juxtaposition of unrelated objects, as in the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s allusive, often syntactically and imagistically fractured poems of this era reflect a Dadaist influence. Dadaism had a major influence on surrealism.

Futurism

An avant-garde aesthetic movement that arose in Italy and Russia in the early 20th century. Its proponents—predominantly painters and other visual artists—called for a rejection of past forms of expression, and the embrace of industry and new technology. Speed and violence were the favored vehicles of sensation, rather than lyricism, symbolism, and “high” culture. F. T. Marinetti, in his futurist Manifesto (1909), advocated “words in freedom”—a language unbound by common syntax and order that, along with striking variations in typography, could quickly convey intense emotions. Marinetti and other Italian futurists allied themselves with militaristic nationalism, which alienated their cause internationally following World War II. Russian futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky profoundly influenced the development of Russian formalism, while in England the futurist movement was expressed as Vorticism by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis in their magazine BLAST. Listen to “Futurism and the New Manifesto” here. See also Mina Loy’s“Aphorisms on Futurism”.

Painter and poet Mina Loy has been associated with most of the literary and artistic movements of the early 20th century: dadaism, surrealism, futurism, feminism, modernism and post-modernism. While she aligned herself more closely with the visual arts, her reputation was primarily built on her writing.

She grew up in Munich, London, and Paris, and in 1907 moved to Florence, where she grew close to Filippo Marinetti, leader of the futurist movement there. The futurists, fueled by an impatience with a society they perceived as overly loyal to history, and as a result insufficiently active and innovative, hoped to apply recent advances in industry, machinery, and war to the literary and artistic communities. Impatient for the future, they advocated speed, aggression, industry, and struggle. The movement, which ran from 1909-1944, was marked by a series of manifestos published by its members.

Loy, a writer known for her frank embrace of female sexuality and feminist politics, joined the futurist movement in 1913, but she quickly encountered conflict regarding the movement’s perception of women. Her manifesto addresses those conflicts within a context of support for the movement’s forward-looking vision. Loy sees the female body as a site of resistance, and advocates affirmation and growth rather than destruction.

By 1915 Loy had left the movement, due to the misogyny and fascism she encountered there. Loy’s brief time with the futurists marks the greatest creative output of her career. “Aphorisms on Futurism” was first published in photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work in January of 1914.

DIE in the Past
Live in the Future.

THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.

IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.

AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.

THE straight line and the circle are the parents of design, form the basis of art; there is no limit to their coherent variability.

LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.

OPEN your arms to the dilapidated; rehabilitate them.

YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened.

BUT the Future is only dark from outside.
Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light.

FORGET that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself—

FOR the smallest people live in the greatest houses.

BUT the smallest person, potentially, is as great as the Universe.

WHAT can you know of expansion, who limit yourselves to compromise?

HITHERTO the great man has achieved greatness by keeping the people small.

BUT in the Future, by inspiring the people to expand to their fullest capacity, the great man proportionately must be tremendous—a God.

LOVE of others is the appreciation of oneself.

MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.

THE Future is limitless—the past a trail of insidious reactions.

LIFE is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself.

TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.

THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.

HE can compress every aesthetic principle in one line.

THE mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.

LOOKING on the past you arrive at “Yes,” but before you can act upon it you have already arrived at “No.”

THE Futurist must leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from stepping-stone to stone of creative exploration; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts.

THERE are no excrescences on the absolute, to which man may pin his faith.

TODAY is the crisis in consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.

CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.

LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create.

UNSCREW your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of Life—Whole.

MISERY is in the disintegration of Joy;
Intellect, of Intuition;
Acceptance, of Inspiration.

CEASE to build up your personality with the ejections of irrelevant minds.

NOT to be a cipher in your ambient,
But to color your ambient with your preferences.

NOT to accept experience at its face value.

BUT to readjust activity to the peculiarity of your own will.

THESE are the primary tentatives towards independence.

MAN is a slave only to his own mental lethargy.

YOU cannot restrict the mind’s capacity.

THEREFORE you stand not only in abject servitude to your perceptive consciousness—

BUT also to the mechanical re-actions of the subconsciousness, that rubbish heap of race-tradition—

AND believing yourself to be free—your least conception is colored by the pigment of retrograde superstitions.

HERE are the fallow-lands of mental spatiality that Futurism will clear—

MAKING place for whatever you are brave enough, beautiful enough to draw out of the realized self.

TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark.

THEY are empty except of your shame.

AND so these sounds shall dissolve back to their innate senselessness.

Surrealism

An artistic philosophy that took hold in 1920s Paris and spread throughout the world in the decades that followed. André Breton outlined its aims in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic. Breton and his colleagues were inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of unconscious thought. Through “automatic writing” and hypnosis, artists could free their imaginations to reveal deeper truths. The French poets Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Pierre Reverdy embodied early surrealist principles, as did Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Surrealist practices were also used in the visual arts, particularly in the paintings of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Joan Miró, and René Magritte, and in the films of Jean Cocteau. A second generation of surrealist writers emerged in other parts of the world, especially in Latin America; see the poems of Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. The surrealist aesthetic has influenced modern and contemporary poets writing in English as well; James Tate, John Ashbery, and Michael Palmer are notable examples.

Harlem Renaissance

A period of musical, literary, and cultural proliferation that began in New York’s African-American community during the 1920s and early 1930s. The movement was key to developing a new sense of Black identity and aesthetics as writers, visual artists, and musicians articulated new modes of African-American experience and experimented with artistic forms, modernist techniques, and folk culture. Harlem Renaissance artists and activists also influenced French and Caribbean Négritude and Negrismo movements in addition to laying a foundation for future Black Arts champions like Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka. Writing luminaries of the period include Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Arna Bontemps. See Hughes’s article “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Black Poet as Canon-Maker”. Browse more Harlem Renaissance poets.

Gwendolyn Brooks writes a bit after the Harlem Renaissance, at the tail end, but this seems like a good location for her.

Objectivism

A loosely affiliated group of American poets writing in the 1930s and ’40s. Harriet Monroe famously solicited an edition of Objectivist work for Poetry, guest-edited by Louis Zukofsky, which featured work by many of the poets later associated with the movement. The Objectivist poets, as described by Zukofsky, were influenced by the writing of Ezra Pound and took many cues from the earlier Imagists: both groups wrote poetry that featured highly concentrated language and imagery and terse vers libre. The Objectivists, however, focused on everyday life and language, treating the poem as an object itself and emphasizing sincerity and the poet’s clear vision of the world. Core Objectivist poets include Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and the British poet Basil Bunting. Browse Objectivist poets.

Please read all these (mostly untitled) poems by Lorine Niedecker, followed by an excerpt from George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” – about being a part of mass society:

These works, selected by Jenny Penberthy, are featured on the Electronic Poetry Center (the page at the link) courtesy of University of California Press.

My man says the wind blows from the south,
we go out fishing, he has no luck,

I catch a dozen, that burns him up,

I face the east and the wind’s in my mouth,

but my man has to have it in the south.

.
Black Hawk held: In reason
land cannot be sold,
only things to be carried away,
and I am old.

Young Lincoln’s general moved,
pawpaw in bloom,
and to this day, Black Hawk,
reason has small room.

.
The clothesline post is set
yet no totem-carvings distinguish the Niedecker tribe
from the rest; every seventh day they wash:
worship sun; fear rain, their neighbors’ eyes;
raise their hands from ground to sky,
and hang or fall by the whiteness of their all.

.

What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
Time is white

mosquitoes bite
I’ve spent my life on nothing.

The thought that stings. How are you,

Nothing, sitting around with Something’s wife.
Buzz and burn

is all I learn
I’ve spend my life on nothing.

I’m pillowed and padded, pale and

puffing lifting household stuffing–
carpets, dishes

benches, fishes
I’ve spent my life in nothing.

.

Jesse James and his brother Frank

raided, robbed and rode away.
Said Frank to the rising Teddy R:

You’re my type, you’re okay.

Once on his way to a Shakespeare play

Frank was almost caught.

The gunnin Jameses and the writn Jameses-

two were taught and all were sought.

No killers were Frank and Jesse James,

they was drove to it. Their folks was proud.

Let no one imagine they were bad as kids-

brought up gentle in a bushwack crowd.

.

Along the river

wild sunflowers over my head

the dead who gave me life

give me this our relative the air

floods our rich friend

silt

.

New-sawed clean-smelling house sweet cedar pink

flesh tint I love you

.
The wild and wavy event
now chintz at the window

was revolution . . .
Adams

to Miss Abigail Smith:
You have faults

You hang your head down
like a bulrush

you read, you write, you think
but I drink Madeira

to you
and you cross your Legs

while sitting.
(Later:)

How are the children?
If in danger run to the woods.

Evergreen o evergreen
how faithful are your branches

.

Poet’s Work

Grandfather

advised me:

Learn a trade

I learned

to sit at desk

and condense

No layoff

from this

condensery

.

In the transcendence of convalescence the translation of Bashô

I lay down

with brilliance I saw a star whistle

across the sky before dropping off

.

Spring

stood there

all body

Head

blown off

(war)

showed up

downstream

October

is the head

of spring

Birch, sumac

Before

the blast

.

You see here
the influence
of inference

Moon on rippled
stream

‘Except as
and unless’

.
Cleaned all surfaces
and behind all solids
and righted leaning things

Considered then, becurtained
the metaphysics
of flight from housecleanings

.

My Life by Water

My life

by water–

Hear

spring’s

first frog

or board

out on the cold

ground

giving

Muskrats

gnawing

doors

to wild green

arts and letters

Rabbits

raided

my lettuce

One boat

two–

pointed toward

my shore

thru birdstart

wingdrip

weed-drift

of the soft

and serious–

Water

.

Consider

the alliance—

ships and plants

The take-for-granted bloom of our roadsides

Queen Anne’s Lace

Black Eyed Susans

rode the sea

‘Specimens graciously passed

between warring fleets’

And when an old boat rots ashore itself once living plant

it sprouts.

Thomas Jefferson Inside

Winter when no flower

The Congress away from home

Love is the great good use one person

makes of another (Daughter Polly of the

strawberry

letter)

Frogs sing–then of a sudden all their lights go out

The country moves toward violets

and aconites

.

Foreclosure

Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws

‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’

2

So spoke of the existence of things,

An unmanageable pantheon

Absolute, but they say

Arid.

A city of the corporations

Glassed

In dreams

And images—

And the pure joy

Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter,

Is impenetrable.

3

The emotions are engaged

Entering the city

As entering any city.

We are not coeval

With a locality

But we imagine others are,

We encounter them. Actually

A populace flows

Thru the city.

This is a language, therefore, of New York

4

For the people of that flow

Are new, the old

New to age as the young

To youth

And to their dwelling

For which the tarred roofs

And the stoops and doors—

A world of stoops—

Are petty alibi and satirical wit

Will not serve.

5

The great stone

Above the river

In the pylon of the bridge

‘1875’

Frozen in the moonlight

In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness

Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,

Which loves itself

6

We are pressed, pressed on each other,

We will be told at once

Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts

In a paroxysm of emotion

Now as always. Crusoe

We say was

‘Rescued’.

So we have chosen.

7

Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous.

8

Amor fati

The love of fate

For which the city alone

Is audience

Perhaps blasphemous.

Slowly over islands, destinies

Moving steadily pass

And change

In the thin sky

Over islands

Among days

Having only the force

Of days

Most simple

Most difficult

9

‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’

I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me

New Criticism

Name given to a style of criticism advocated by a group of academics writing in the first half of the 20th century. New Criticism, like Formalism, tended to consider texts as autonomous and “closed,” meaning that everything that is needed to understand a work is present within it. The reader does not need outside sources, such as the author’s biography, to fully understand a text; while New Critics did not completely discount the relevance of the author, background, or possible sources of the work, they did insist that those types of knowledge had very little bearing on the work’s merit as literature. Like Formalist critics, New Critics focused their attention on the variety and degree of certain literary devices, specifically metaphor,irony, tension, and paradox. The New Critics emphasized “close reading” as a way to engage with a text, and paid close attention to the interactions between form and meaning. Important New Critics included Allan Tate,Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the term “intentional fallacy”; other terms associated with New Criticism include “affective fallacy,” “heresy of paraphrase,” and “ambiguity.”

Black Mountain School

A group of progressive poets who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. These poets, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, promoted a nontraditional poetics described by Olson in 1950 as “projective verse.” Olson advocated an improvisational, open-form approach to poetic composition, driven by the natural patterns of breath and utterance. Browse more Black Mountain poets.

Charles Olson

1910–1970

Charles Olson was an innovative poet and essayist whose work influenced numerous other writers during the 1950s and 1960s. In his influential essay on projective (or open) verse, Olson asserts that “a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.” Form is only an extension of content and “right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand. . . . I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.” Olson goes by ear, and his lines are breath-conditioned. The two halves, he says, are: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” He believes “it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born. But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse. . . . The other child is the LINE. . . . And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath. . . .” Robert Creeley explains thus: “What he is trying to say is that the heart is a basic instance not only of rhythm, but it is the base of the measure of rhythms for all men in the way heartbeat is like the metronome in their whole system. So that when he says the heart by way of the breath to the line, he is trying to say that it is in the line that the basic rhythmic scoring takes place. . . . Now, the head, the intelligence by way of the ear to the syllable—which he calls also ‘the king and pin’—is the unit upon which all builds. The heart, then, stands, as the primary feeling term. The head, in contrast, is discriminating. It is discriminating by way of what it hears.” Olson believes that “in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!” So, all the conventions that “logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line.”

Olson thus rejected “academic” verse, with its closed forms and alleged artifice. The Times Literary Supplement notes that “culture, civilization, history (except history as personal exploration as in Herodotus) and, above all, sociology, are dirty words for him.” Olson said: “It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature. . . . If he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. . . . This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destructions (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. . . . I keep thinking, it comes to this: culture displacing the state.” M. L. Rosenthal comments: “The problem is to get back to sources of meaning anterior to those of our own state-ridden civilization and so to recover the sense of personality and of place that has been all but throttled.”

Robert Duncan, in his essay “Regarding Olson’s ‘Maximus,’” writes: “Olson insists upon the active. Homo maximus wrests his life from the underworld as the Gloucester fisherman wrests his from the sea.” Olson’s striding poetic syllables, says Duncan, are “no more difficult than walking.” Duncan traces Olson’s aesthetics to nineteenth-century American sources: “I point to Emerson or to Dewey,” writes Duncan, “to show that in American philosophy there are foreshadowings or forelightings of ‘Maximus.’ In this aesthetic, conception cannot be abstracted from doing; beauty is related to the beauty of a archer hitting the mark.” A Times Literary Supplement reviewer observes that Olson’s style is at times a “bouncy, get-in-with-it manner,” often involving the “juxtaposition of a very abstract statement with a practical, jocular illustration of what the statement might imply.” Wrote Olson: “It’s as though you were hearing for the first time—who knows what a poem ought to sound like? until it’s thar? And how do you get it thar ezcept as you do—you, and nobody else (who’s a poet?. . .)”

Anyone familiar with contemporary poetry would agree with Robert Creeley when he calls Olson “central to any description of literary ‘climate’ dated 1958.” Olson’s influence extends directly to Creeley, Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Paul Blackburn, and, as Stephen Stepanchev notes, Olson’s projective verse “has either influenced or coincided with other stirrings toward newness in American poetry.” He himself owed a great deal toEzra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Edward Dahlberg. The scope of Olson’s work is “as broad as Pound’s,” writes Kenneth Rexroth. It is not simple poetry, much of it being fragmentary and experimental. But it has, says Rosenthal, “the power of hammering conviction—something like Lawrence’s but with more brutal insistence behind it. It is a dogmatic, irritable, passionate voice, of the sort that the modern world, to its sorrow very often, is forever seeking out; it is not a clear voice, but one troubled by its own confusions which it carries into the attack.”

Olson did not consider himself “a poet” or “a writer” by profession, but rather that nebulous and rare “archeologist of morning,” reminiscent of Thoreau. He wrote on a typewriter. “It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pause, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.”

Charles Olson’s influential manifesto, “Projective Verse,” was first published as a pamphlet, and then was quoted extensively in William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography (1951). The essay introduces his ideas of “composition by field” through projective or open verse, which is a continuation of the ideas of poets Ezra Pound, who asked poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome,” and William Carlos Williams, who proposed in 1948 that a poem be approached as a “field of action.” Olson’s projective verse focuses on “certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.”

Composition by field opposes the traditional method of poetic composition based on received form and measure. Olson sees the challenge of the transference of poetic energy from source to poem to reader, and the way in which that energy shifts at each juncture, as particularly of concern to poets who engage in composition by field, because the poet is no longer relying on a received structure as a propulsive force.

Harnessing poet Robert Creeley’s assertion that “form is never more than an extension of content” and Edward Dahlberg’s belief that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception,” Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath:

“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”

Olson argues against a lazy reliance on simile and description, which can drain a poem of energy, and proposes that syntax be shaped by sound rather than sense, with nuances of breath and motion to be conveyed to the reader through typographical means.

Beat poets

A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s. Its ranks included Allen Ginsberg,Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, and Gary Snyder. Poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth influenced the development of the “Beat” aesthetic, which rejected academic formalism and the materialism and conformity of the American middle class. Beat poetry is largely free verse, often surrealistic, and influenced by the cadences of jazz, as well by Zen and Native American spirituality. Browse more Beat poets.

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—

—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye—

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these

entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,

San Francisco Renaissance

Not a single movement, but a constellation of writers and artists active in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of World War II. Poets associated with the San Francisco Renaissance include Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, and Michael McClure. Though the poets wrote in different styles and often espoused different aesthetic and political views, all favored the Modernist tradition of innovation, and many were influenced by Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School. Donald Allen’s influential anthology The New American Poets included a section devoted to the “San Francisco Renaissance,” and many claim that by labeling the group, Allen in some way invented it. However, the poets writing in San Francisco at that time were active and influential across many genres, and often read and collaborated with one another.

OuLiPo

An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. Unlike the Dada and surrealist movements, OuLiPo rejects spontaneous chance and the subconscious as sources of literary creativity. Instead, the group emphasizes systematic, self-restricting means of making texts. For example, the technique known as n + 7 replaces every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after it in the dictionary. Notable members of this group include the novelists George Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

Christian Bök’s Eunoia, which we looked at the first day of workshop, is definitely a rigorous OuLiPo poem. You can find the whole poem here:

Confessional Poetry could be thought to have its descendant (though confessional poetry still continues to be written!) in Elliptical poetry, see below — which more mimics or enacts the mind in thought. Both are forms of Lyric Poetry.

Frank O’Hara was a dynamic leader of the “New York School” of poets, a group that included John Ashbery,Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. The Abstract Expressionist painters in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s used the title, but the poets borrowed it. From the beginning O’Hara’s poetry was engaged with the worlds of music, dance, and painting. In that complex of associations he devised an idea of poetic form that allowed the inclusion of many kinds of events, including everyday conversations and notes about New York advertising signs. Since his death in 1966 at age forty, the depth and richness of his achievements as a poet and art critic have been recognized by an international audience. As the painter Alex Katz remarked, “Frank’s business was being an active intellectual.” He was that. His articulate intelligence made new proposals for poetic form possible in American poetry.

After service aboard the destroyer USS Nicholas in the South Pacific during World War II, he entered Harvard (Edward Gorey was his roommate), first majoring in music but changing to English and deciding to be a writer. His first published work was some poems and stories in the Harvard Advocate. While living in Cambridge, O’Hara met poets Ashbery, who was on the editorial board of the Advocate, and V. R. “Bunny” Lang. In 1956 O’Hara was one of the original founders of the Poets Theater in Cambridge. On occasional visits to New York, he met Koch and Schuyler, as well as the painters who were likewise to be so much a part of his life, notably Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. He was the first of the young New York Poets to write regular art criticism, serving as editorial associate for Art News, contributing reviews and occasional articles from 1953 to 1955. He had a long association with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, beginning as a clerk at the information and sales desk in the front lobby, later becoming an assistant curator at the museum and an associate curator of painting and sculpture in 1965, despite his lack of formal training. He was an assistant for the important exhibition, “The New American Painting,” which toured eight European cities in 1958-1959. This exhibition introduced the painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement to European audiences. The title of the exhibition was changed when Donald Allen used it as the title of his anthology The New American Poetry. While employed by the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara was the curator or cocurator of nineteen exhibitions. He was an active and articulate spokesman for the new painting inside the major collecting museum in New York. He performed his administrative and curatorial duties surrounded by ceaseless conversation about art, poetry, music, and dance.

O’Hara’s work was first brought to the attention of the wider public, like that of so many others of his generation, by Allen’s timely and historic anthology, The New American Poetry (1960). It was not until O’Hara’s Lunch Poems was published in 1965 that his reputation gained ground and not until after his sudden death that his recognition increased. Now his reputation is secure as an important and even popular poet in the great upsurge of American poetry following World War II. His influence on the next generation of poets—including Bill Berkson, Alice Notley, and Ted Berrigan—was immense. He did not cultivate academic alliances or solicit editors and publishers. Painter John Button remarks: “When asked by a publisher-friend for a book, Frank might have trouble even finding the poems stuffed into kitchen drawers or packed in boxes that had not been unpacked since his last move. Frank’s fame came to him unlooked-for.” His recognition came in part because of his early death, the somewhat absurd and meaningless occasion of that death (he was run down by a beach taxi on Fire Island), the prominence and loyalty of his friends, the renown of his own personality, and above all, the exuberant writings themselves. His casual attitude toward his poetic career is reminiscent of the casual composition of many of the poems themselves. One of his poems, “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),” for example, was written on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading, and his most important statement of poetics, “Personism,” was written in less than an hour while Allen, who requested it, was on his way across town to pick it up. Koch touches upon this particular quality of O’Hara’s genius—his naturalness: “Something Frank had that none of the other artists and writers I know had to the same degree was a way of feeling and acting as though being an artist were the most natural thing in the world. Compared to him everyone else seemed a little self-conscious, abashed, or megalomaniacal.” When this quality entered his verse, his work was formally inventive and most compelling.

During his lifetime O’Hara was known as “a poet among painters,” part of a group of such poets who seemed to find their inspiration and support from the painters they chose to associate with, writing more art reviews and commentary than literary opinion. O’Hara published only two book reviews: one of poetry collections by friends Chester Kallman, Ashbery, and Edwin Denby; the other of John Rechy’s City of Night, 1963. His own art criticism, the major portion of which has been collected as Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (1975), helped to encourage the painters he liked best and maintain the public awareness of them, although in itself it is nowhere as brilliant as, for example, Rainer Maria Rilke‘s writings on Auguste Rodin or Charles Baudelaire’s on the Salon of 1846. Professional critics found O’Hara’s criticism too subjective and lacking in the disciplines of critical analysis. Hilton Kramer was particularly critical of O’Hara’s book Jackson Pollock (1959), claiming that the excessive praise and poetic writing spoiled the discussion of the paintings. O’Hara’s poetry itself is most painterly, making the best judgment of painting while participating in the actual techniques of abstract art.

O’Hara’s poetry, as it developed, joined the post-Symbolist French tradition with the American idiom to produce some of the liveliest and most personable poetry written in the 1950s and early 1960s. O’Hara incorporated Surrealistic and Dadaistic techniques within a colloquial speech and the flexible syntax of an engaging and democratic postmodernism. His special subject was the encounter of the active sensibility with the world about it through extravagant fantasy, a ready wit, and a detailed realism of feelings. The result, a unique blend of elements, has earned him a memorable place in American poetry. He hastened the development of an art form hitherto little practiced in English (The Waste Land [1922], for example, is seldom designated as authored by both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot) that was to become popular in the later 1960s and 1970s among younger poets—the collaboration: O’Hara wrote poems with Ashbery, Koch, and Berkson; created “translations” from the French; produced a series of lithographs with Rivers, collages with Goldberg, comic strips with Joe Brainard, “Dialogues for Two Voices and Two Pianos” with composer Ned Rorem, and a movie with painter Alfred Leslie. He was the subject of portraits by many of his artist friends—an indication not only of his association with painters but also of the esteem in which the artists held him. His early death only contributed to his legend and kept alive his memory until the publication of his collected writings confirmed for many what a few, mostly his friends and fellow poets, already knew—that he was an immensely gifted poet.

most persistent interest was the image, in all its suddenness, juxtaposed with an equally unlikely image, following techniques not of Imagism but those perfected by the French Surrealists. This period of experimentation and learning (although the imitations and parodies continued) advanced into an interest in post-Symbolist French poetry, especially that of Guillaume Apollinaire and later Pierre Reverdy, along with the big-voiced, roaring surrealism of Vladimir Mayakovski. At the same time O’Hara’s innate Americanness was encouraged by writers such as William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, together with the colloquial W. H. Auden, whom he felt to be an “American” poet in “his use of the vernacular.”

O’Hara was alert to all developments in his chosen art. Between 1952 and 1958 he either attended or participated in discussions of the new poetry and the new painting at the Abstract-Expressionist meeting place in New York called The Club. His essay,”Nature and New Painting,” indicating a surprisingly early familiarity with Charles Olson‘s “Projective Verse” essay (1950) before it became widely known later in the decade, was the subject of three panel discussions in January and February of 1955.”

Among the poems of this early period, “Oranges” stands out. A series of twelve prose poems (originally nineteen) written while he was home from Harvard during the summer of 1949, they are less the “pastorals” of their subtitle than a decidedly anti-Arcadian surrealistic parody beginning: “Black crows in the burnt mauve grass, as intimate as rotting rice, snot on a white linen field.” About twenty copies of the poems, with a painting by Hartigan on the cover, were later published on the occasion of an exhibit of Hartigan’s Oranges paintings. As Terence Diggory has demonstrated, Hartigan did twelve paintings for twelve O’Hara poems in the fall of 1952, and by so doing redefined her relationship to Abstract Expressionism and proposed a mode of “collaboration as a dialogue of multiple selves” between poets and painters that influenced poets and painters alike. The poems themselves do not even mention the word of the title, a cleverness the poet was well aware of.

When the Surrealists left Europe for America just before and during World War II, they injected Surrealism into American poetry and painting. O’Hara’s poem of 1953 is the leading example of an attempt to install the European model in contemporary writing, but as Koch writes in his review of The Collected Poems in the New Republic: “For all their use of chance and unconsciousness, Frank O’Hara’s poems are unlike Surrealist poetry in that they do not programmatically favor these forces (along with dreams and violence) over the intellectual and conscious. He must have felt the beauty and power of unconscious phenomena in surrealist poems, but what he does is to use this power and beauty to ennoble, complicate, and simplify waking actions.” The poem might be said to be, in light of the manner of composition and success of the later poems, overworked, trying too hard to assert the mode of composition. One need only compare the “Poem” beginning “Now the violets are all gone, the rhinoceroses, the cymbals”–the same catalogue of disparate objects–to see how, when the personality takes over, a true, more shareable lyricism flowers. Perloff wisely points out that when the two strands are merged–the surrealistic, with its endless variety and high-spirited inventiveness, and the personal, the spoken American, the colloquial narrative with its charming persona–O’Hara attains his triumph.”

The lyrical/narrative “I,” the “I” with verve and personality, the distinctive O’Hara persona, the “I” of what he himself called his “I do this I do that” poems, makes its appearance as early as “Music,” written in 1954. There too the persona is set upon a representational landscape of midtown Manhattan, where landmarks are called by name, as they exist in public reality (the Equestrian statue, the Mayflower Donut Shoppe, Bergdorf Goodman’s, Park Avenue itself). Just how personal and lyrical this “I” is can be seen in “To the Harbormaster,” a love poem written for Rivers that sustains the metaphor of a ship. Other poems from this period concern images of a different order, including movie stars such as James Dean, both a symbol and a victim of popular culture, to whom no less than four poems are dedicated. There is also the mock-heroic “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” addressed “to you, / glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope, / stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all / your heavenly dimensions and rever berations and iconoclasms!” The mock epic continues later with the equally amusing “Ave Maria,” beginning: “Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!”

The poet is immersed in his mode, his monde. The perceptions and information follow along with the acts of seeing and thinking. The same is true of his poem of determined optimism dedicated to painter Mitchell (“Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s”), where happiness is “the least and best of human attainments,” or the cohesiveness of “Platinum, Watching TV, Etc.,” preserved in Poems Retrieved (1977), or the equally expansive poem to another painter friend titled “John Button Birthday.” These are all poems written when O’Hara was most at home in his world and at the full strength of his style. They are followed by a series of Odes (1960) and continue into his most productive years, 1959 and 1960. When he wrote them, it was another dawning in American poetry and he one of the chief instigators, as he knew himself in his “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s,” when he wrote: “tonight I feel energetic because I’m sort of the bugle, / like waking people up. . . .”

The year 1959 was probably O’Hara’s best, when one of his most famous poems, “The Day Lady Died,” was written. Like Joel Oppenheimer‘s “Billie’s Blues,” this poem is a tribute to the jazz singer Billie Holiday. Told in terms of the unconnected events of normal living, with nothing revealed ahead of time, the powerful realization of an ending is suspended until events mount up and force the realization of great loss. The poem demonstrates the process of the poet finding in the non-causal relationships of events that a singular coherence precipitates strong emotions. It begins with a (possibly) feigned and protracted preoccupation with cultural paraphernalia and distractions of the quotidian but moves with suddenness to testify to the sanctity of human life and talent, and the eternality of art that is literally, mimetically, breathtaking. It moves through a series of choices until there are none, until the poet arrives face to face with the unchosen, the uninvited but inevitable, irreversible wonder of loss.

Death silences the trivia. The last line merges object into subject (at precisely “everyone”) in the flux of events in the continuous postmodernist universe. Writing in the simultaneous present, the poet seeks control over both time and timing–the arrival (or denial) of images, the coming (or postponing) of a conclusion, but the conclusion of the value of life and art comes because of the mounting of a series of transactions in the daily enterprise.

The series of love poems to dancer Vincent Warren–including “Les Luths,” “Poem (Light clarity avocado salad),” “Having a Coke With You,” and “Steps”–are all affirmative, delicate, precise, poems of frontal immediacy, heartfelt, with feeling no longer hidden behind a bravado of brilliant images and discordant segments. O’Hara moves out of the modernist mode of dada, surrealism, and cubism and into the postmodern advantage: a variety of techniques, which actually incorporate the salient gains of modernism while losing nothing of the flexibility and possibility of openness, the “going on your nerve” of “Personism.” At its worst or most excessive, his style lapses into giddiness, or what Stuart Byron calls “Queertalk.” While surely not limited to sexual ambiguity, the language of the poems is ripe with in-talk of the 1960s; these qualities are indeed dominant in O’Hara’s poems from the start. They also happen to be the reason for their great success.”

O’Hara is a poet of the city who concentrates on enacting the processes of the mind as it contacts reality. Perceiving reality and attempting to remodel it in poetic form, he is perceiving and thinking spatially in blocks of information, both personal and referential, as a way to demonstrate that the acts of poetry are fully engaged in the activities of loving people, interacting with historical as well as contemporary events.

— George F. Butterick, University of Connecticut
— Robert J. Bertholf, State University of New York at Buffalo

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

Barbara Guest rose to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of an informal group of writers known as the New York school of poets whose membership included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, andJames Schuyler. Their innovative approach to poetry was influenced by modern art, especially surrealism and abstract expressionism. Guest drew on her own background in art (she worked for Art Newsmagazine in the 1950s) to create poetry which Tyrus Miller in Contemporary Poets described as a tension-filled balance between “a lyric, or purely musical, impulse; and a graphic or painterly impulse.” Guest eventually moved away from these early influences; her recent works are more in line with the language poets, whose primary interest is the actual word and not so much the image it evokes. “My poems tend more to language than to ideas,” Guest told American Poetry Review‘s Mark Hillringhouse. Some of Guest’s works are collaborations with other artists, including Richard Tuttle and June Felter, in which words and drawings combine to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Guest’s interest in poetry developed while she was a college student in California, but flourished only after she had relocated to New York, which she told Hillringhouse “seemed like civilization [after] coming from the West Coast.” Guest found acceptance in the thriving New York City art scene of the 1950s, and as she told Hillringhouse, “I began to believe in my poetry, in its future.” Her influences ranged from the artists Jackson Pollock and Tony Smith to the writers Henry Miller (an acquaintance from California who suggested she move to New York) and Dorothy Richardson. Though she acknowledged the influence of the “gestural freedom” of abstract expressionism on her early work, she told Hillringhouse that she does not see this as a prominent motivation in her more recent work. Poets, not artists, tend to be Guest’s current influences; she named the French poet Anne Marie Albiach as “one of the finest writing poetry today,” and she once admitted to Contemporary Authors, “I drag my coattails in the dust of the Russian poets Akamatova and Mandelstam.” Criticizing the current prominence of “postmodern” art and lamenting the “decline of painting today” in the interview with Hillringhouse, Guest claimed that poetry “is the most interesting art form right now” because of its mission to expand the “modern tradition.”

Guest’s interest in the history of Imagism prompted her to write Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World, the biography of the original Imagist poet. Imagism developed in the years following World War I and is much less structured than poetry of the previous generation. Marked by a free-verse prose and succinct, vivid images, Imagism was popularized in Europe primarily through H. D., her husband Richard Aldington, and Ezra Pound. Through her access to unpublished documents, Guest painted a portrait of Hilda Doolittle, the woman that Pound—Doolittle’s childhood sweetheart—called “a tree-born spirit of the wood.”

In the volume of poetry Fair Realism, the narrative reveals Guest’s painterly nature, according to American Poetry Review contributor David Shapiro, who noted Guest’s “acute sense of landscape and landscape painting.” These are poems “suffused with a classical sense of history, literature, and mystical import,” commented Jessica Grim inLibrary Journal. Robert Long in his Southampton Press review of the Fair Realism praised Guest’s “stunning lyricism, her ability to leave everything out of a poem but the essential…. The silences in Guest’s poems are as important as the sound.” Commenting on the twenty-two page poem “Tuerler Losses” in which a poet laments the loss of two valuable wristwatches, Long summarized that “there is not other contemporary poet who has assembled this wide a range of effects, these different kind of ‘musicality’ and this visual variety into a single poem of such length and has made it hang together.”

Reinforcing Guest’s association with the language poets, Manousos claimed that Guest’s poetry is for “those who are moved by the play of language for its own sake.” Guest once told Contemporary Authors that she considers “American poets in their forties and fifties and in particular women poets (without being a feminist in literature) …to be writing the finest poetry today.” Shapiro lauded Guest as a poet distinguished in both “lyric and critical prose,” as well “as an important precursor of the ‘Language’ poets.” Shapiro continued, “When one looks at work Barbara Guest accomplished in the late 1950s and early 1960s, one finds pieces that often seem to have been written yesterday, if not tomorrow.”

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

Reader-Response theory

A theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to poststructuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them. Unlike text-based approaches such as New Criticism, which are grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences—reads—it. The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive communities,” make meaning out of both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned ways of reading. The theory is popular in both the United States and Germany; its main theorists include Stanley Fish, David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser.

Black Arts Movement

A cultural movement conceived of and promoted by Amiri Baraka in the mid-1960s. Its constellation of writers, performers, and artists included Nikki Giovanni, Jay Wright, Larry Neal, and Sonia Sanchez. “We want a black poem. And / a Black World. / Let the world be a Black Poem,” writes Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) in his poem “Black Art,” which served as a de facto manifesto for the movement. Its practitioners were energized by a desire to confront white power structures and assert an African American cultural identity. Its aims were community-minded as well as artistic; during its heyday, hundreds of Afrocentric repertory theater companies, public art projects, and publishing ventures were organized throughout the United States.

Ethnopoetics

In linguistics, folkloristics and anthropology, a method of analyzing linguistic structures in oral literature. The term was coined in 1968 byJerome Rothenberg, whose anthology Technicians of the Sacred is considered a definitive text of the movement. In poetry, ethnopoetics refers to non-Western, non-canonical poetries, often those coming from ancient and autochthonous cultures. In the early 20th century, Modernist and avant-garde poets such as Antonin Artaud and Tristan Tzara used “primitive” or oral traditions in their work; by midcentury, a curiosity regarding world literature had coalesced into a movement led by Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock, who together edited the journal Alcheringa from 1970 to 1980. Contemporary poets with an interest in ethnopoetics include Gary Snyder, Kathleen Stewart, and William Bright.

We will be reading a selection from the ethnopoetics anthology Shaking the Pumpkin, ed. By Jerome Rothenberg, in a few weeks.

Language poetry

Taking its name from the magazine edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), Language poetry is an avant garde poetry movement that emerged in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as a response to mainstream American poetry. It developed from diverse communities of poets in San Francisco and New York who published in journals such as This, Hills, Tottels,L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Tuumba Press. Rather than emphasizing traditional poetic techniques, Language poetry tends to draw the reader’s attention to the uses of language in a poem that contribute to the creation of meaning. The writing associated with language poetry, including that by Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, and many others, is often associated with deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the Objectivist tradition.

Language poetry emerged in the mid 1970s as both a reaction to and an outgrowth of the “New Am. Poetry” as embodied by Black Mountain, New York School, and Beat aesthetics. Within the pages of little magazines like Tottel’s, This, Hills, and the Tuumba chapbook series, poets such as Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, Bob Perelman, and Robert Grenier developed modes of writing that implicitly criticized the bardic, personalist impulses of the 1960s and explicitly focused attention on the material of lang. itself. This practice was supplemented by essays in poetics, published in journals like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Open Space, Paper Air, and Poetics Jour., or presented in “talk” series conducted at lofts and art spaces. The general thrust of this critical discourse has been to interrogate the expressive basis of much postwar Am. poetry, esp. the earlier generation’s use of depth psychology, its interest in primitivism and mysticism, and its emphasis on the poetic line as a score for the voice. While Language poetry has derived much from the process oriented poetry of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and John Ashbery, it has been skeptical about the claims of presence and participation (see CHARLES OLSON) that underlie such practice.

The response of Language poetry to expressivism (meaning that the art “expresses” the interiority, the selfhood, of the poet/artist) has taken several forms, most notably a deliberate flattening of tonal register and extensive use of non-sequitur. Experimentation in new forms of prose, collaboration, proceduralism, and collage have diminished the role of the lyric subject in favor of a relatively neutral voice (or multiple voices). Language poets have endorsed Victor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie or “making strange,” by which the instrumental function of lang. is diminished and the objective character of words foregrounded.

The poetry of Russian futurism and American objectivism has been influential. Far from representing a return to an impersonal formalism,Language poetry regards its defamiliarizing strategies as a critique of the social basis of meaning, i.e. the degree to which signs are contextualized by use. In order to defamiliarize poetic lang.,Language poetry has had recourse to a variety of formal techniques, two in particular. The first involves the condensation and displacement of linguistic elements, whether at the submorphemic level (as in the poetry of David Melnick, P. Inman, or Steve McCaffery) or at the level of phrases and clauses (Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Barrett Watten). Bernstein, for example, condenses what appear to be larger syntactic units into brief, fragmentary phrases:

Casts across otherwise unavailable fields.

Makes plain. Ruffled. Is trying to

alleviate his false: invalidate. Yet all is

“to live out,” by shut belief, the

various, simply succeeds which.

Although the title of this poem, “Sentences My Father Used,” implies some autobiographical content, there is little evidence of person. The use of sentence fragments, false apposition, and enjambment displaces any unified narrative, creating a constantly changing semantic environment.

A second prominent feature of Language poetry has been extensive work in prose. In the most influential essay, “The New Sentence,” Ron Silliman calls for the organization of texts on the level of sentences and paragraphs. The “new” sentence refers less to deformations of normal sentences as to alternate ways of combining them within larger structures. Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, for example, consists of 37 paragraphs of 37 sentences, each one of which leads to the next by the substitution or replacement of materials from the previous one or by mutiple forms of association.

The issues raised by such writing are not simply aesthetic but involve the social implications of literary reception. By blurring the boundaries between poetry and prose, everyday and literary lang., theory and practice, l. p. has attempted to establish a new relationship with the reader, one based less on the recuperation of a generically or stylistically encoded work and more on the reader’s participation in a relatively open text. By thwarting traditional reading and interpretive habits, the poet encourages the reader

to regard lang. not simply as a vehicle for preexistant meanings but as a system with its own rules and operations. However, since that system exists in service to ideological interests of the dominant culture, any deformation forces attention onto the material basis of meaning production within that culture. If such a goal seems utopian, it has a precedent in earlier avant-garde movements from symbolism to futurism and surrealism. Rather than seeking a language beyond rationality by purifying the words of the tribe or by discovering new langs. of irrationality, Language poetry has made its horizon the material form rationality takes — language itself.

A name trimmed They are seated in the shadowswith colored husking corn, shelling peas. Housesribbons of wood set in the ground. I try to
find the spot at which the pattern on
the floor repeats. Pink, and rosy,
quartz. They wade in brackish water.
The leaves outside the window
tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them,
making it impossible to look past them, and though holes
were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as port-
holes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects
the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into
benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a
few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as
the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over
its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of
the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded
in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different
shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging
into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A
paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray
bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite
directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This
simply means that the imagination is more restless than the
body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without
comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for ex-
ample, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,” and, then,
one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you
feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the
sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly
frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail
remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the
vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day
my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular
pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do.
Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You
can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter
buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for
my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, near-
ly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me
thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it
seems even more incomplete when we were there in person.
Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and
the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed
she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is
an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of
breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rap-
turous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different
world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on
her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along
the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled
by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a
young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by
beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen
from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns,
frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a
message of happiness by which we were called into the room,
as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was
too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed
with colored ribbons.

New Formalism

A late 20th- and early 21st-century movement that championed a return to rhyme and meter in poetry. New Formalist poets such as Dana Gioia, X.J. Kennedy, Brad Leithauser, and Marilyn Hacker responded to the popularity of the dominant free-verse poetry of the 1960s and ’70s by exploring the possibilities of prosody and form in their own work. Though not an orchestrated, coherent movement, New Formalism has been attacked by critics for its perceived retrogressive favoring of traditional metrical artifice over more recent, experimental modes of free verse.

A lyric, as understood today, is a poem that is organized through a subjective position held by the writer and is emotionally consistent, or rather coherent, even if that emotion varies. Lyric presumes a coherent speaker behind the poem who is able to use language to “express him or herself.” The twentieth century can be understood as a kind of cold war between the lyric and the modernist experimental poem, seen in the 1960’s and 1970’s between “language poetry,” which argues through its form that the self is COMPOSED of language, as opposed to “confessional poetry” which if hard on the self is nevertheless confident in language’s ability to reflect the self’s inner state and history. Language AS the building blocks of history vs. language as expressive of history.

New Historicism

A critical approach developed in the 1980s through the works of Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt, similar to Marxism. Moving away from text-centered schools of criticism such as New Criticism, New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end product of a particular cultural moment. New Historicists look at literature alongside other cultural products of a particular historical period to illustrate how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies operated across a broader cultural spectrum that is not exclusively literary. In addition to analyzing the impact of historical context and ideology, New Historicists also acknowledge that their own criticism contains biases that derive from their historical position and ideology. Because it is impossible to escape one’s own “historicity,” the meaning of a text is fluid, not fixed. New Historicists attempt to situate artistic texts both as products of a historical context and as the means to understand cultural and intellectual history.

Conceptual Poetry

An umbrella term for writing that ranges from the constraint-based practices of OuLiPo to Concrete poetry’s visual poetics. Nonreferential and interested in the materiality of language, conceptual poetry often relies on some organizing principle or information that is external to the text and can cross genres into visual or theoretical modes. Generally interested in blurring genres, conceptual poetry takes advantage of innovations in technology to question received notions of what it means to be “poetic” or to express a “self” in poetry. The ideas and practices of conceptual poetry are associated with a variety of writers including Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Vanessa Place. Poetry magazine published a special section devoted to conceptual poetry in its July/August 2009 issue, guest-edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.

Technology is important here, as is the reprocessing of existing language. For example, Kenneth Goldsmith famously typed every single word of one editions of the Sunday New York Times, down to the advertisements and the stock quotes — such projects he terms “uncreative writing.”

Part of the challenge in getting these terms down will be to understand the nuanced differences between OuLiPo, Conceptual Poetry, Language Poetry, etc.

***Note that “Conceptual Poetry” “OuLiPo.” “Language Poetry” and other earlier schools of poetics are all working against the stable speaker self of the lyric poem.

***As far from Conceptual Writing as one might get would lie Confessional poetry. (One could actually debate this, but for your purposes, the key is not to find ambiguity here but some stability in your understanding of the terms…after that we can interrogate them!) Confessional poetry is a form of Lyric Poetry. The lyric poem is “spoken” by a consistent voice related to the self of the poet — most Beat poetry would thus also be lyric poetry. Imagist poetry and Objectivist poetry would be straining against the limits of lyric. Much Black Mountain poetry would be lyric. Flarf and Language Poetry would be anti-lyric. A poem which consisted of the words from a box of macaroni and cheese would NOT be a lyric poem unless one could convincingly argue that there was an underlying and consistent emotional logic to the arrangement of the words. Really, above all what I want you to be able to do after this reading is to be able to sort poems into 1) Lyric 2) Non-Lyric or Anti-Lyric. The test is whether there seems to be a cohesive psychological self as foundation of the poem rather than a kind of net scooping up language from the surrounding cultural detritus or language arranged by some sort of underlying algorithm (as in Eunoia).

Flarf Poetry

Originally a prank on the scam contest sponsored by the organization Poetry.com, the experimental poetry movement flarf has slowly assumed a serious position as a new kind of Internet-based poetic practice. Known for its reliance on Google as a means of generating odd juxtapositions, surfaces, and grammatical inaccuracies, flarf also celebrates deliberately bad or “incorrect” poetry by forcing clichés, swear words, onomatopoeia, and other linguistic aberrations into poetic shape. Original flarf member Gary Sullivan describes flarf as “a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’” Flarf poets collaborate on poems, revising and sometimes plagiarizing them in semipublic spaces such as blogs or webzines. Original members of the “Flarfist Collective” include Sullivan, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, and Nada Gordon. Poetry magazine published a special section devoted to flarf in its July/August 2009 issue, guest-edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.

Slam Poetry

A competitive poetry performance in which selected audience members score performers, and winners are determined by total points. Slam is a composite genre that combines elements of poetry, theater, performance, and storytelling. The genre’s origins can be traced to Chicago in the early 1980s. Since then, groups of volunteers have organized slams in venues across the world. The first National Poetry Slam was held in 1990, and has become an annual event in which teams from cities across the United States compete at events in a host city. For more on poetry slams, see Jeremy Richards’s series “Performing the Academy”. See also poets Tyehimba Jess, Bob Holman, andPatricia Smith.

Tyehimba Jess

Born in Detroit, poet Tyehimba Jess earned his BA from the University of Chicago and his MFA from New York University.

Jess is the rare poet who bridges slam and academic poetry. His first collection, leadbelly (2005), an exploration of the blues musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s life, was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three poetry books of the year by Black Issues Book Review. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that “the collection’s strength lies in its contradictory forms; from biography to lyric to hard-driving prose poem, boast to song, all are soaked in the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues and the demands of honoring one’s talent.” Jess’s forthcoming book Olio is set to arrive in 2016.
A two-time member of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was also Chicago’s Poetry Ambassador to Accra, Ghana. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Soulfires: Young Black Men in Love and Violence (1996), Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000), and Dark Matter 2: Reading the Bones(2004). He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating Our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (2003).

His honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award. A former artist-in-residence with Cave Canem, Jess has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, as well as a Lannan Writing Residency.

Jess has taught at the Juilliard School, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the College of Staten Island in New York City.

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of six books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, The Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Her contribution to the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir, which she edited, won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year and was chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2013. Smith also penned the critically acclaimed history Africans in America (1999) and the award-winning children’s book Janna and the Kings (2003). She is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, a 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of a Lannan fellowship and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is currently working on a biography of Harriet Tubman, a poetry volume combining text and 19th century African-American photos, and a collaborative novel with her husband Bruce DeSilva, the Edgar-Award winning author of the Liam Mulligan crime novels.

Elliptical poetry

A term coined in 1998 by poet and critic Stephen Burt in a review of Susan Wheeler’s Smokes. In the piece, which first appeared in theBoston Review, Burt describes elliptical poets as those who “try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves.” Burt’s description of elliptical poetry emphasized its quick shifts in diction and referent, and use of occluded or partially obscured back-story. A special issue of American Letters and Commentary was devoted to elliptical poetry, sparking debates over contemporary trends and schools in American poetry. Burt pointed to several poets whose work commonly exhibits these features, including Mark Levine, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Liam Rector.